I seem to recall my father and I having this discussion in I believe it was 1961. It would appear the Judge has figured it out as well. Behind the curtain, it certainly looks to be all the same. As the Judge points out, the sameness is reflection of a single party system, with two meaningless, theatrical names.
Big Gov't is simply proof of the fraud in simple numerics. Gov't employee pay scales now exceed that of the private sector worker performing similar work, with the added benefit of the Gov't worker being protected from termination or lay-off following his or her initial one year probationary period. The one party scheme is complete when gov't Civilian Personnel Office hiring targets the recruitment of the pesky entitlement crowd, who already support big gov't. We cannot beat them [literally or figuratively], so we'll just insist they join us.
It's become a giant, self-licking ice cream cone and police state that would be the envy of any former Soviet Union senior party functionary or African tribal chiefton.
I regret I have no solution. I fear we are in stage five, or for lack of a better term, the final Zimbabwefication.
#4
Our system is supposed to be a federal republic, not a democracy. IIRC it was Adam Smith way back when that stated that democracy could only work until people figured out that they could vote themselves other peoples money.
Democracy is not a fraud anymore that capitalism is a fraud. What we have way to much of are re-definitions of terms until they are meaningless.
Liberal, Capitalism, Democracy, etc. don't mean what they used to mean anymore so talking about them doesn't amount to squat.
#5
The socialist believe its a fraud and play it so to keep the outer party and proles amused. To the socialist there is no free will, only a primate hierarchical arrange of power in which they are the prime males. With out free will as a basis, there can be no self rule, plebiscites, contract, et al. Enjoy plebs.
#6
There is nothing wrong with the ideal of Democracy and a Republic. Benjamin Franklin said, "We have given you a democratic-republic… if you can keep it.”
The elitists have turned this country into a friggin third world banana republic or a Chicago thugocracy.
#8
The quality ain't what it used to be.
..you tend to get more of what you subsidize. Rewarding failure and punishing success sort of goes that way when stuffing the ballot box becomes the be all and end all of the game.
Posted by: Bobby ||
07/25/2014 13:43 Comments ||
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#10
It may not be a fraud, but the people running it sure are.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
07/25/2014 13:53 Comments ||
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#11
When you think about running for office you begin to wonder why anyone in their right mind would subject themselves to life in the public eye. I think most sensible people would shy away from that. Then you have to consider the tremendous expense these days of running a political campaign. Who would do that and who would give them the money? I'm afraid that kind of power attracts the wrong kind of people and we certainly can't trust the moneyed interests who finance the campaigns. If we had some honest journalists who would really investigate these matters and scream bloody murder about what they found we might be alright. But if you want to be a successful journalist in this country you have to do what your employers tell you to do. It is worrisome.
The last time we had real civil unrest in this country was back in the 1960s and early 1970s. Lyndon Johnson lost his job. I remember those days and it really sucked. It felt like the whole country went insane after Kennedy got shot. After that Richard Nixon changed the course, slowly and not always the way everybody thought he should have. But he did bring about some changes. Maybe that's what it takes. I saw a Tea Party rally last weekend. I felt like pulling the car to the side of the road and joining them but Mrs. Uluque had other plans for me that day. When it gets to be as bad as it was in the 1960s those other plans might have to take a back seat. I just hope it's not too late.
#12
EU, I too lived through the '60s and it did suck.
My fear is that the militarization of police and all federal agencies (the EPA with SWAT teams) means that if it looks to go bad it will go bad much faster than the '60s.
Think about the fall of the USSR. No real problems than, poof, tanks in the street.
#13
..oh, there were real problems. Gorby knew cause he had a separate means of assessment rather than the 'official' reports that were only penned with what the apparatchiks knew their uppers wanted to hear. Just like the bureaucracy in the Beltway keeps telling the movers of the levers of government that its all working (see-VA et al).
[DAWN] "Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the deaders, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there."
IT doesn't take much intelligence or courage to spout hate, which is why so many powerful people around the world do so on such a regular basis. Evidently, espousing a politics of hate can even be a short cut to power. As is the case in Israel.
The quotation above is from barely two weeks ago; the words belong to Ayelet Shaked, a far-right politician in the Israeli Knesset. Clearly her exhortations have had a positive effect: warplanes continue to wreak havoc on Gazoo and its people, accountable to no one.
We in Pakistain, as much as in any other Moslem-majority country, like to point to the crimes of the Israeli state (and often its people too) against a hapless Paleostinian population as evidence of how the rest of the world is aligned against the forces of Islam.
We would do well to remember that Paleostine is the birthplace of Christianity, and there are still tens of thousands of Christians in the occupied territories today. More importantly, those in glass houses should not throw stones.
It is said often, but dwelt on far too little: Pakistain and Israel are more alike than any other two states in the world. As might be expected of countries created in the name of religion, to be a genuine rights-bearing citizen requires one to be Moslem or Jewish respectively. The state practises institutionalised discrimination against those who do not hail from the privileged confessional group, and justifies everything else it does in the name of the community of the righteous.
Why, then, do we have such wildly differing attitudes towards the Israeli state as compared to our own? The religious right's duplicity is to be taken for granted, but Pak liberals are just as culpable, happy to endorse state excess if and when the brunt is borne by 'illiberal' social and political actors.
Even now liberal ideologues in many Moslem societies, as well as those posing as 'experts' in Western countries, are busy heaping all the blame for the carnage in Gazoo on the Paleostinians, and more specifically, Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason,. In effect, they are echoing the language of the Israeli state; that all the Paleostinians being killed and maimed by the Israeli Defence Forces are either Death Eaters or almost as bad because they are aiding and abetting terrorism.
This sounds eerily similar to what we hear about re-establishing the 'writ of the state' in this country nowadays. The more measured supporters express concern for the 'collateral damage' caused by the 'absolutely necessary' use of force against the evil enemy, while the less politically correct simply say everyone affected deserves what they are getting.
Let us not forget that the British claimed to be the harbingers of liberalism, but ended up establishing what the Indian thinker Partha Chatterjee has called the 'rule of colonial difference', which meant simply that the colonial state enjoyed absolute power to both enfranchise and enslave on the basis of arbitrary distinction.
Of course, the Israeli and Pak states have taken the 'rule of colonial difference' to its logical extreme. Simply invoking liberal values to justify state actions, as happens regularly in Israel and Pakistain alike, does not whitewash the brute reality of supremacist ideology and the systematic violence that typically accompanies it.
Sadly, those who purport to resist power are also known to resort to the politics of hate, as, for example, certain Sindhi and Mohajr nationalists are doing at the present time by whipping up a frenzy against refugees seeking to enter Sindh from war-devastated North Wazoo. Their logic is essentially no different from that of the state; that the Taliban disguised as refugees will end up waging violence against the rightful sons of Sindh's soil.
While there may be a legitimate argument that can be made by progressive Sindhis against non-Sindhis coming into Sindh and further upsetting what is already a skewed demographic balance as a result of decades of migration, both orchestrated (as at partition) and otherwise, the racist depths to which some ethnic-nationalists have descended is inexcusable.
It is thus that a wide cross-section of political forces in this country are breeding hate, just like their counterparts in the Israel that so many of us love to hate. One might even be tempted to laugh at the irony but for how grotesque it all is.
Posted by: Fred ||
07/25/2014 00:00 ||
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Link ||
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#1
Hey Ahmad, we don't hate you. You are just vermin.
Like the writer, I unfriended someone on Facebook this morning, though because I try to choose my friends carefully, the triggering post was not as egregious as the examples he gives, merely MLK, Jr's delicate suggestion that only by returning the conquered territories could Israel achieve the high moral standard he expected of the country he so loved. I decided I have much better things to do than to contribute to the education of the poster and her friends.
#1
Traling Wife. No matter they were no friends to begin with. By the way even if I alm not in Facebook and if we don't know personally you can add me in your list
#5
You are darlings, all of you. Poke your head into the O Club for my email address, and we'll make it so. (I used to attach my email to my name out here, but one of Fred's upgrades made that impermanent so I gave up.)
There are two dimensions to fighting a War on Terror. One is fighting terrorists and the other is fighting terrorism. In conventional warfare there isn't that much of a difference between fighting men and their tactics. There is a wider space between fighting terrorists and their tactics.
Conventional armies use tactics to defeat enemy forces and seize territory. Terrorists however use tactics to take over mental territory. A suicide bomber is not out to take over a particular block. He is out to change how the enemy and his side think about that city block and the larger conflict.
Terrorism has succeeded in accomplishing that goal in Israel. The scale of terrorism turned every piece of land into a mathematical equation. How many lives was this village in Gaza worth? How many lives is this West Bank town worth? How many lives is East Jerusalem worth?
This emotional calculus is misleading because it is an immediate response to a set of deaths. However terrorists are not trading an end to violence for a village or a town. They are calculating how many deaths it will take to force Israel to abandon that village or town. And once they have it, they will use it to inflict more terror on another town or village, this time using rockets.
Israelis were convinced that a price in lives had been put on Gaza and that if they withdrew, the killing would end. But Gaza was just the beginning. Not the end. There is never an end.
#1
While the author has many interesting points, IMO that he over-thinks the problem of terrorism. Shintoism, Nazism, and Communism all embraced terrorism and used the tactics of terrorists. All of these involved the aspects of fighting terrorists as well as fighting terrorism. These ideas were embedded within nation-states. While it is difficult to stamp out a cancerous idea it can be done. It is best to do it early. Usually, the world waits until this process is very costly. One cannot argue, debate, or negotiate with such people and hope to change their minds. They are zealots. One has to beat down those who hold these cancerous ideas by utterly defeating them. The movement which is cancerous usually grows in extent until the world recognizes the scope of the threat to the well-being of the world. One can not fight a war without a complete commitment to the defeat of the enemy on all fronts; on the battlefield as well as the mental and propaganda aspects. Today, it includes more sophisticated aspects such as the cyberwar. Strategies and tactics must accompany this commitment. It seems the U.S. of late has ceded its leadership role in the world. It has capitulated on the idea that its way of life and exceptionalism is the better way and the higher road. Part of the problem is that there has been an insidious erosion of this notion within the institution of American life; education, government, and the media. The country seems to have a fifth column working insidiously and assiduously against its goodness.
"The wars of this century are less and less likely to resemble the wars of the last. And a military that was largely designed and built for the last century may need serious restructuring in order to successfully win the wars of this one."
#1
The classic story is the generals that plan to fight the last war. It's why the most successful commanders in a war usually have to be promoted to their position; they were out of 'style' during peace.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
07/25/2014 19:25 Comments ||
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#2
Why worry about fighting wars when you've already surrendered your borders. You're more likely to be arrested at the border for bringing in a piece of fruit than being a member of a notorious gang traveling to their tribe in el Norte or carrying an infectious disease.
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Wazoo
